Unblurring a blurry screenshot
A screenshot is pixel-perfect when taken, so blur means something happened afterwards.
Why screenshots come out this way
The capture itself is exact: it records what the screen displayed. Softness arrives later, when the file gets emailed, forwarded through a chat, pasted into a document that recompresses it, or enlarged from a small phone display to fill a laptop screen. A screenshot of a video call is the exception, because there the blur was already in the stream.
What to run, and in what order
Upscaling is almost always the right tool. The problem is missing pixels rather than displaced ones, so a deblur pass has nothing to gather. If the screenshot is mostly text, the deblur-text tool handles letterforms better than the general pass does.
The tool for this is Unpixelate an image.
Practical notes
- Look for the original capture before processing, since the copy in your own Photos folder is usually cleaner than the one someone forwarded
- For a screenshot of a document, crop to the part you need first so the upscale spends its resolution there
- Re-taking the screenshot at a larger display size beats any processing, when the source is still available
Questions
Why is my screenshot blurry when the screen looked sharp?
The capture was sharp. Compression during sending, or enlargement afterwards, introduced the softness. The file you are looking at is not the file your phone originally wrote.
Can you sharpen text in a screenshot?
Yes, and text responds better than most content because letterforms are predictable. Use the text tool rather than general enhancement, and verify any digits that matter.
Going deeper
How to deblur text in an image explains the method behind this, including what it cannot fix.